Friday, May 8th 2026
Arc Raiders Dev Tests New Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Solution, Raising Questions About Linux Support
Arc Raiders is one of only a handful of semi-competitive, shooters with a large player base that has a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, thanks to its Linux-friendly Easy Anti-Cheat implementation. In a recent blog post addressing the studio's plans to "ensure fair play," Arc Raiders developer, Embark Studios, confirmed that it is testing a new kernel-level anti-cheat solution that the studio expects "will sharpen both detection and precision throughout Speranza and the Rust Belt." The studio confirms that, in addition to the pre-existing kernel-level anti-cheat implementation, it relies heavily on machine learning tools and input telemetry data in order to catch cheaters. In spite of these existing efforts, Steam user reviews still complain bitterly about the presence of cheaters in Arc Raiders.
It should be noted that Embark has clearly considered Linux playability via Proton and similar tools, as well as its Steam Deck Verified status, until now. There's a fair bit of the anti-cheat blog post dedicated to accessibility and players on uncommon hardware and input devices, with the developer promising to continue letting players with unorthodox accessibility tools play the game. Additionally, when Embark first implemented kernel-level anti-cheat in The Finals, it promised to maintain support for Linux and the Steam Deck, so there's a fairly decent chance that Arc Raiders may remain playable on Linux devices. That said, in cases like that of Apex Legends, Respawn and EA have claimed that dropping Linux support resulted in a 33% decline in cheaters, giving rise to a notion in certain circles that Linux is a cheater's operating system.
Sources:
Embark Studios, ProtonDB
It should be noted that Embark has clearly considered Linux playability via Proton and similar tools, as well as its Steam Deck Verified status, until now. There's a fair bit of the anti-cheat blog post dedicated to accessibility and players on uncommon hardware and input devices, with the developer promising to continue letting players with unorthodox accessibility tools play the game. Additionally, when Embark first implemented kernel-level anti-cheat in The Finals, it promised to maintain support for Linux and the Steam Deck, so there's a fairly decent chance that Arc Raiders may remain playable on Linux devices. That said, in cases like that of Apex Legends, Respawn and EA have claimed that dropping Linux support resulted in a 33% decline in cheaters, giving rise to a notion in certain circles that Linux is a cheater's operating system.
44 Comments on Arc Raiders Dev Tests New Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Solution, Raising Questions About Linux Support
But they really don't need to anyway, just take any current distribution recent release that gets frequent updtes and you already will get good performance without much difference. And for anyone truly invested in SteamOS like "accurate" experience, there's always the option to just setup Arch Linux manually like so or use an Arch based distribution.
they don't just give it a game session's data and tell it to figure it out
they set parameters as to what should constitutes a cheater, actual data of recorded cheaters
The only real player with actual financial skin in gaming on Linux is Valve. They are going to have to be the ones to stick their necks out. Almost all other Linux distro maintainers are hobbyists with day jobs.
If your anti cheat software locally can't see it, how can the server ?
This is not rocket science and would be trivial to implement IF the devs gave a damn to use their brains for something more than a seat cushion.
Discuss with civility and play nice.
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